Among the many new books published each season is a shelf full of notable anthologies, each one showcasing the work of writers united by genre, form, or theme. The Anthologist highlights two recently released or forthcoming collections, including Electric Gurlesque.
Fourteen years ago, poets Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg released Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (Saturnalia Books, 2010), a catalogue of provocative verse by eighteen contemporary poets, including Matthea Harvey, Cathy Park Hong, and Brenda Shaughnessy. Greenberg’s introductory essay to the now cult-classic text theorized their feminist, critical, and campy ethos, dubbed gurlesque. Now Greenberg and new coeditor Becca Klaver have updated the original anthology with an expanded, digital volume, Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books, August 2024), which includes work by more gurlesque poets—including Melissa Broder and LaTasha Nevada Diggs—as well as essays by Carmen Giménez, Metta Sáma, and others who consider the shifting meanings and practices of gurlesque poetics.
Among people historically marginalized by the literary establishment, those who live in the U.S. without citizenship have faced some of the thickest barriers to being heard. Activism by the group Undocupoets, however, has dismantled some of those obstacles during the past decade, spurring publishers and other gatekeepers to end citizenship as a qualification to be considered for opportunities and awards. The current organizers of Undocupoets—Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin—have opened yet another door for undocumented writers in their editorship of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose From the Undocumented Diaspora (Harper Perennial, September 2024). Writing by fifty-two poets in the volume “challenge misconceptions of what it means to write as an undocumented person in twenty-first-century America” while offering “a vision” for a more inclusive artistic future.
